It might surprise you, but personal branding is much more important for your career success than you think. No matter how hard you work and how good you are at what you do, if you don’t pay attention to your personal branding, achieving career success will be rather difficult.

Personal Branding and Self-Promotion

What’s the connection to career success? Why do we need to promote ourselves in order to succeed?

It is a fact that there are a lot of people (most of them women) who truly hate to talk about themselves; what they do, what they know, what they have to give. They believe their advertisement should be their work. They think that self-promotion is like bragging. I know, I am one of them! (at least I used to be – I’m making progress)

But it isn’t like that at all! The truth is that self-promotion is about demonstrating your value. And demonstrating your value is about building your personal brand.

And don’t forget: every time you are applying for a job, you are selling yourself. The ‘product’ is you! And like any other product, you need a good advertisement.

This is why my choice for today is Margaret Buj’s article on ‘career attraction’. Her article is meant to help people who feel awkward advertising themselves. She provides five tips for promoting ourselves with ease and confidence.

You Need to Change Your Perspective

Authentic self-promotion is about giving and sharing. You are not bragging; you’re giving and sharing your gifts with the world. You’re sharing ideas that can change a person’s life.

Self-promotion is about strategically building your personal brand to ensure that those who can help you accomplish more in your career will know not just who you are, but the value you have to offer and how you’d like to add more of it.

The truth is, people aren’t going to know how talented and accomplished you are unless you tell them! If those who can help you accomplish more in your career don’t know who you are and the value you have to provide, it doesn’t serve anyone.

You can read the whole article here: “How to Promote Yourself with Ease and Confidence”

Even if you won’t be able to implement all of these at once, with one step at a time you’ll be one step closer to your career success.

However, I’d like to endorse the statement in the closing paragraph of her article: “Letting the fear of being criticized determine what you do is a surefire way to never achieve what you want in work or in life“. What a valuable lesson! If you manage to adopt this way of thinking in your life, you can’t even imagine how much happier you will be and how free you will feel! It’s the only way of pursuing your dreams and letting them come true…

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